Transmedia

We could start this chapter at any one of several points, and each of
them get something fundamental across, so let’s start with a set of
disparate beginnings.

Interactive media, our teenager, is almost fully grown, and has
experienced a number of things since adulthood loomed over
the horizon. Fashions may come and go, but the appeal of
subcultures, of associating with something that offers
identification with a herd, a common perspective and ethos, appeals
to every young person. As digital writing has begun to mature, it
takes stock of its surroundings and realises that far from a
childish pursuit, the industry that has developed around games, and
digital games in particular, is growing at an incredible rate,
eclipsing the niches occupied by hypertextual narrative and MMORPGS.
Our teenager’s peers are embracing a new form of storytelling—coined ‘transmedia narrative’—and it seems that here, at last, a
culture born intertextual, postmodern, might find a voice.

There is a contract between author and audience. Maintained and
supported by the text (the story, for want of a better catch-all),
it asks them to build worlds, populate them with believable
characters and then send those newly created personas off
on adventures. World building is one of the principal functions of
good storytelling. Talented writers craft an environment we can
believe in. It might be ours, it might be a little off-kilter from
the norm, but it is a world, and we build it together.

Technology is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. We carelessly transmit
the details of our lives through social networks, as naturally as
breathing air. Our digital exchanges are as real as those in
the world. They might not have the virtue of physicality, but we pay
as much attention to them as we do to a handshake, the expression in
someone’s eye. Sometimes we pay more attention.

If we live and breathe digitally as much as we do physically, then
why should we deny our characters and their world that same freedom.
In fact, surely granting them the same detail, the equivalent
texture, is world building too?

You know, we can do it, so why shouldn’t we.

Each of these origins, addressed individually, might give rise to a
singular approach to digital storytelling—and each can, in fact, do
just that—but together they merge, overlap, infiltrate each other’s
territory and what we get is this:

Transmedia storytelling.

There is much to be admired about Transmedia work, and we’ll celebrate
each of them in turn, but as a whole, it’s a mess. A huge, sprawling,
cacophony of world and story and technology and virtuality and illusion
that has no centre, no point, and very often, no control. Ursula K Le
Guin put it eloquently (Ursula K Le Guin never puts anything less than
eloquently, and we should read more of her writing) in From Elfand to
Poughkeepsie:

There is only a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed. To create what Tolkien calls “a secondary universe” is to make a new world. A world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation. The only voice that speaks there is the creator’s voice. And every word counts.

Transmedia wants to have its cake and to eat it. It wants the construct
to be provided—the fabric of the world exists, ready to be populated
with tweets and status updates, with diary entries found pinned to the
wall of a child’s bedroom, with knowing asides to the camera (because
Transmedia knows that a camera is present, all the time)—and it wants
the pact between author and reader to be easy, to be smoothed by this
plasterwork and nails built by other hands and never questioned. By
wanting everything, by eschewing restraint, it wastes and scatters. It
is lazy.

If transmedia works at all, it is when it restrains itself. When it
nudges into another platform just to show you something storyable,
something that pertains and cannot be told another way. Writing is
rules, and care, and (Le Guin again):

It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.

What Transmedia is good at is the illusion of emerging story. Like
serial fiction, Transmedia narratives emerge a piece at a time, over
time and bit by bit. They slip into the world and draw their readers
into a story that, in not presenting itself as a finished thing,
suggests that it is happening now. Not in a galaxy far far away, or on
some lonely shore, or in last night’s dream of Manderley.

Transmedia is adept at imitating the real.

That’s not terribly helpful though, if you’re dead set on writing a
story that is going to be told across synchronous platforms. The real is
probably as far from your thoughts as you need it to be. What you need
to know is how to use each platform and, more importantly, when to use
them.

Before we get to the practical advice though, a little more history and
context (you can skip to the end if you only came here for the practical
stuff):

Transmedia offers the inclusion of ancillary content as an available
feature of digital’s platform agnostic potential. As elements to be
utilised, video, audio, first and second person records, diary entries
and confessionals, maps, illustrations and games are all present within
a broader platform that ‘consumes other media’ and remediates that
content in language and grammars familiar to their analogue forebears.
It is perfectly natural that digital storytelling should seek to include
those previously invisible content streams as elements within a
connected, intertextual landscape.

Henry Jenkins, then Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic
Arts at MIT, reflected that transmedia storytelling—the coordinated
use of storytelling grammars across platforms—can work to make
characters more compelling. It’s a persuasive argument; as readers
become conversant with each other’s presence on distributed media
platforms, and as they observe and embody the performance exhibited by
blogging, social media and other aspects of telepresence, then offering
those facilities to characters in a fictional universe ought to render
them more clearly, with fuller personalities, nuances and contradictions
than is available in the linear, closed system offered by conventional
writing practices.

What has emerged though, outstrips Jenkins’ proposal for narrative
synchronisation across digital channels. When characters in a TV show
are gifted blogs in the ‘real’ world, communicating with viewers (now
readers) in real time, regardless of the temporal status of the primary
channel of narrative delivery, the result isn’t synchronous
characterisation; it’s shouting. Their twitter accounts might engage
with conversation with each other and with a remote audience, imparting
some sense of consequence to that communication, but they lack the
constructed nuance of dialogue and mis-en-scene present in an authored,
closed textual space. Book content extends into video material, as
extra-textual trailers for the primary text, where they at least
function as a marketing lead for new audiences, or less cohesively as
video diaries seemingly aping the narrative function of found-footage
film familiar to audiences viewing ‘The Blair Witch Project’.

Transmedia offers the opportunity to engage with the characters in a
story, to be a part of the storied events. It is difficult to match the
intention of a crafted paragraph with the multiple-channel,
cross-platform future we seem to be wandering headlong into. Worse,
its even harder to imagine who is going to pay attention long enough to
actually read it all.

Transmedia devices extend narratives into games, in fact, it could be
proposed that they are the result of a financially attractive games
industry being eyed up in a bar by a hard-up linear story. Jenkins
observes the narrative causality of ‘The Matrix’ as a particularly
prominent example of this; the release of the second and third films in
the Wachowski’s film trilogy was accompanied by short fiction within the
universe established by the first film, a series of animated films
broadening the narrative foundation of the series, and a computer game
which provided a key element of the second film’s plot sequence, without
the completion of which certain elements of story within the third film
make scant sense. Picking apart elements of story construction in as
large an endeavour as ‘The Matrix’ is not the role of this volume, and
however constrained by time, cinema release, technology or audience each
element might have been, the question that remains unanswered by
proponents of transmedia story form is this: to what extent is each
element necessary to the overall story? Or is it simply well constructed
fan-fiction within that world; not adding anything of consequence, nor
illuminating character in a manner described by Jenkins.

Since the emergence of a set of paragons for transmedia form—‘The
Matrix’ as cheerleader in chief—that difficulty of marrying form to
content to intention has remained. It is possible that the wholehearted
adoption of transmedia form by established production houses, and the
subsequent emergence of a generation of writers capable of creating
content within those platforms is a result of the fragmentation effect
of remediated media forms, however what remains is a sense that all too
often, new platforms and ancillary content—blogs, games, social media
all—are included within a product’s release because then can be, and
not because they should be.

Examining transmedia storytelling, we are confronted with a cacophony of
rhythms constructed to achieve affect rather than story, to imbue
atmosphere through sound and vision in place of good storytelling.

Transmedia is Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

That’s the problem. When we throw the contents of the whole kitchen
cupboard at story, it just makes a mess. An inedibe, glutinous, sticky,
disorienting mess. A recipe is built up carefully, with attention. Let’s get to the cookbook.

If you want to write transmedia, then don’t make the mistake of thinking
that The Matrix is what you’re making. The Matrix is loud, and
expensive, and you can’t remember what happened in the second film, can
you? What The Matrix represents is a marketing executive’s dream of what
digital storytelling might be. Dedicated readers (superfans—we’ll use
this term again) will seek out and devour everything, at a fair amount
of expense, and while they might represent a decent income—for as long
as their attention is on you—they don’t last. Marketing transmedia is
brand extension, is a campaign to sell someone else’s product and it’s
beneath you.

John Clute, in his review of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition
(2003), identifies within Gibson’s text transmedia phenomenons useful
for Transmedia writers to consider:

It would be inappropriate – this early in the life of the book – to strip the latter parts of the story wide open; but this can be said. All 135 sequences of the footage (film fragments released anonymously on the internet by the ‘Garage Kubrick’) to date are numbered steganographically – that is, through a complex process of ‘digital watermarking’ which must be deciphered to be read – in a pattern that seems unmistakably to represent the map of some urban area. That the pattern is in fact not a city map, that it is in fact something whose implications wrench the heart, the reader will discover. For the pattern, and the story embedded in the pattern, and the maker of the pattern, are one. Together, they are the wound of the world doing story. (2003: 405)

Clute isn’t terribly interested in digital writing. What he’s
identifying in Gibson’s story—through the means of its telling—is,
beyond the demand for decoding; a substructure that nods toward
something else, something storyable, something that pertains and cannot
be told another way. When Transmedia restrains its ambition, it can
achieve something as subtle as the substructure of Gibson’s tale. The
implication of utilising technology to tell a story suggests that the
action of the reader is somehow required—somehow manifested—in the
uncovering of meaning. Gibson is interested in story, and the manner in
which technology can be utilised to tell a story in a new way. That does
not equate to letting the technology tell the story though: In all of
Gibson’s work, new tools and techniques are the ground in which to work,
not the work itself.

Brand extension is a way to work with digital elements though. While The
Matrix’ transmedia elements amount to little more than a reworking of
Lucasfilm’s Expanded Universe vision for the Star Wars series, it is
possible to approach the extension of an existing text in a way that
demonstrates some aspect of the narrative left unsaid, or in need of
explanation, although this is not without its own problems.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy sits squarely within his ‘Weird
Fiction’ stable of work. The first novel—Annihilation—follows the
twelfth expedition sent into a zone (of Southern Florida) out of kilter
with the rest of the world. The manner of the story dictates that each
character is referred to only as their role—the Biologist, the
Surveyor, the Psychologist—a naming structure that extends into their
documentation of Area X itself. Annihilation had a digital ‘extension’ designed to work as a taster for the
book, an incursion into the real world and a bridge back to Area X.
Within the site, viewers are introduced to the themes of the novel
(paranoia, deception, implanted suggestion and a larger,
quasi-governmental organisation pulling the strings) and invited to
undertake a training and selection procedure, making decisions about how
to react to what Area X contains.